On my way to my maternal grandmother's cottage in Saskatchewan today, I stopped in Regina to visit my paternal grandmother who has Alzheimer's. She still seems to be relatively okay in the mornings and gets worse as the day progresses. I showed up around 3 pm. While I have been learning about Alzheimer's for about a year and a half now, since she was diagnosed, I am still learning. Today I learned how quickly my grandmother's mind switches between utterly confused, to knowing exactly who I am, to being stuck in some distant memory, and back to utterly confused again. Sometimes all within the same sentence. I had always been under the impression that this transition was slower, more consistent, but I am learning that memory loss comes in fits and starts and sometimes is not necessarily memory loss so much as memory combining.
The mind is such a mystery. At all ages and stages.
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